My IVFing History

Welcome to my blog! I’m happy to share my trials and tribulations with you along this incredibly difficult and heartbreaking journey. Please feel free to share with me or contact me.

It it with a mixture of joy and extreme anxiety that I write this next sentence: I am pregnant.

Here is my brief history:
2010 – TTC. Nothing happening.
2011 – Began ART. Ireland. Had 3 IUIs. All failed.
2012 – IVF #1 April. Middle East. Three ‘slow’ embryos transferred. BFN.
IVF #2 August. New clinic in MEast. 3 transferred, BFP. Suspected Ectopic, operated, found a cyst. Miscarried a week later at 8 and a half weeks.
2013 – IVF #3 Feb. Ireland. Multinucleation in embryos but 5 make it to d5 blastocysts. Best 2 transferred. Other 3 frozen. BFN.
March – consultant pleads with us to transfer frozen embies, we hadn’t the heart.
June – Had hysteroscopy and endometrial ‘scratch’. Supposed to help implantation.
July. FET. 3 survived the thaw. 2 good embies transferred. BFP.

It’s been a long and rocky road for me and my husband. Three failed IUI’s, before we began IVF. One “zero negative” in April 2012. One big fat positive in August 2012 – yay! However my HCG levels see-sawed like a crazy thing for weeks after. At week 7 they suspected an ectopic pregnancy and I underwent emergency surgery to remove what they thought was the embryo in my left fallopian tube.
I can safely say that day was among the lowest in my life. After finally getting pregnant, to be told I had to have it cut out of me broke my heart.
I was fighting back tears all the way to the operating table. When I came to, fading in and out of consciousness, and a doctor was telling me “it was a cyst. It was blue” I thought I was still dreaming. It was not ectopic, it was a benign cyst. And I was still pregnant.

Sadly, ten days after this episode, my HCG levels were still see-sawing and finally started coming down. “It’s not viable” the doctor bluntly told me. I requested a D&C in the end and my ordeal was over. That was September 30 2012.

In Feb 2013 we had another round of IVF which failed. We were devastated.

Unbelievably, after two of our frozen embryos (the duds we thought) were transferred, one has implanted and I’m now pregnant. We’ve a long way to go. It’s one day at a time now.

Feel free to comment and share your own story. Talking to others is what has gotten me through infertility without going insane. And no one understands as much as other women who have shared the pain.